Steve Dembo, of Discovery Education, started a fun project with his Twitter network this holiday season. Using Elfster, ed tech people across the country signed up to be Secret Santas or Elves for each other. Via this web site, you could communicate anonymously with participants, leaving clues or getting ideas for gifts. Elfster also did the logistics of assigning elves to recipients; it’s a very handy service and seemed to facilitate this gift exchange. I decided to kick things up a notch and communicated with my draw using another ID via Twitter (Ewan Macintosh thought I as a spammer). I also made a map in Google Maps with clues and she had to post her guesses to the map. I even made a visit to an EdTechTalk chat! It was lots of fun and gave me ideas for improving this next year. It was also a good way to learn something about other ed tech people that I haven’t had a lot of contact with previously.

Here’s the VoiceThread I created for group participants to leave messages for their draws or Secret Elves! I hope more people will join in…. email me if you’d like to receive a VoiceThread invitation.

Many thanks for the cute necklace and iTunes gift from Mrs. Jan Abernethy in PA! Cheryl, you should be receiving something you requested from some peace company (wow, those things are popular… they were hard to find) and also something that’s representative of my hometown. I’m looking forward to following both of you more closely now in the ed tech world!